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Friday, August 29, 2014

Confession:
I have been dreading reading Jane Austen since I took The Classics Club project. Why? Because I regarded her books as chicklit—or chicklit in 18th
century style if you like. Basically, romance is never my favorite genre, unless
it’s only an added touch to a much serious topic. So, when I joined Jenna’s Austen in August, I was really gambling; I didn’t know what I was about to
read, and even was not sure whether I would finish it. But at least, I said to
myself, I would be able to say in the end of the event, that I have tried. So,
I picked Sense and Sensibility, more
because it was the lightest of all. I have tried once to read Pride and Prejudice, but could not get
through more than one chapter.

Sense and Sensibility is more or less a
character analysis of the society around 17th century, where Austen
lived. In particular, it’s about Elinor and Marianne Dashwood—the sense and the
sensibility. The sisters are from middle class family, and in age to find a
husband—like any girls of their age in that century. Austen brought us to see
the different approach of both sisters in trying to secure their love lives. Elinor—strong
and reserved—used more of her logic than emotion; while Marianne—expressive and
emotional—used her emotion more than logic. They were both so different, but they
loved and took care of each other so well. Elinor fell in love with the simple
and shy Edward Ferrars, while Marianne was attracted to the handsome and
flamboyant Willoughby. Everyone but Elinor was deceived by both men’s manners.
I think you would guess the end of both men, although—as usual—there will be
twists before all ended up, quite predictably.

Of the two,
I think I prefer Elinor; maybe because I am more like her than Marianne. Elinor
could see things deeper, and could separate the essential from the trivial.
While Marianne, who only saw the outer appearance or things on the surface,
were often deceived. I think Elinor’s qualities made her tougher, the qualities
I like from a woman and a friend. Expressive person like Marianne is used to
bore and tire me; and they are often more vulnerable too.

Beyond the
sisters, I also learned about different types of people in the society, which
Austen satirized cleverly in this book. Her idea to portrait how people treated
marriage as merely business, was very witty, but I think her style was rather
flat and boring. The first half was almost nonsense that I seriously thought to
dump it. But, fortunately, I refused to give up, as someone said that it will
pick up if I keep staying with it. And it was.

In the end,
what did I get? Not much. I can say now that I have read Jane Austen at least
one book, but beyond that, I am at the same stage as before. I do not like her
book. Period. And I think it would be the end of it. I don’t despise her; it’s
just that her style does not fit my taste.

Friday, August 22, 2014

What does the central
character want? What is standing in her way? And what strategy does she pursue
in order to overcome this block?

Lily Bart
wants a happy, independent, and luxurious life. Unfortunately she is
orphan and poor, and the society she lives in does not provide any means
of independent income for women. On the contrary, it crushes poor women to make
way for the rich ones. Her only option is to marry a rich husband, no matter
she loves him or not. (who said women didn’t do business and politics at that
era? It’s just more delicate than what men did!).

Who is telling you
this story?

Wharton told
it from third-person objective. I don’t know why, but she sometimes
called the heroine as Lily, but at other times, Miss Bart. Was it just for
variation, or did she mean something with it?

Images and metaphors

I found many
imagery of water in this novel; the words like: wave, flood, sink,
drowned, ocean, floating, etc. They usually represent Lily Bart’s unfortunate
events, as if to highlight her helplessness against the powerful society movements,
just like a tiny object in the ocean—it is swayed and crushed without the power
to fight back. This object could not survive because the ocean is not its
habitat. The same applied to Lily Bart; she does not belong to the society she
was brought up for. One of the water metaphors:

“Over and over her the sea of humiliation
broke – wave crashing on wave so close that the moral shame was one with the physical
dread. […] His touch was a shock to her drowning consciousness.”

Beginnings and
endings

This book is
opened with passivity and stagnation. Lily talks with Selden about how a
girl with her ambition must force herself into the society, and marriage with a
rich husband is a must. There is also a sense of imprisonment; I can feel from
the opening that Lily is a free character; she knows what she must do (marrying
a rich husband), but she is reluctant to make the commitment.

The ending
is a resolution.
Whether Lily has intentionally ended her life or not, even Selden knows that
she won’t be happy if she had lived. Her dream is not correspond with the law
of society at that time. Selden and Lily distinguish from the others because
they have uncorrupted moral; but Selden survives because he is financially
independent, whereas a girl does not provided with that privilege.

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Lily Barts’
Battle to Freedom: How a poor but sophisticated girl struggles to make money
without submitting herself to men’s dominion, keeps suffering under social
determination, does not fit in working class, excluded from any social place, and
finally gives up in solitary tragic death.

Book 1

Lily Bart is
trying to catch a husband at her 29 years of age; the richer the better. Lawrence
Selden proposed to her, but she rejects him for not being rich. Her pick is
Percy Gryce—very rich but boring—but instead of sealing the case immediately,
she let herself wavering from him. Gryce married another girl after Bertha
Dorset spreads bad things about Lily. Then Gus Trenor introduced the innocent
Lily to the stock market; invested money in the girl; insisting to get sex for
exchange, which she disgustingly rejects. Her conservative aunt hears about her
bad conduct, and she only left her small money, only enough to pay her debt to
Trenor.

Book 2

Simon
Rosdale and George Dorset also want to marry Lily and promise financial safety,
but she rejects them all. Instead, she departs to Mediterranean with the
Dorsets, only to be humiliated by Bertha Dorset, and banished from her social
circle and most her former friends. She tries to climb the social ladder by
attaching herself to new riches, only to be associated by another scandal.
Finally Lily enters the worker life, but fails too. Selden tries to help her in
marriage proposal, but she relinquishes her past, and ‘accidentally’ takes
overdose sleeping pills.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Time flies
so really quickly, and here we are already on the eighth month of 2014, two
third of our sail to the past with History Reading Challenge 2014. This
is our second check in, to check how we have been progressing since our start.
Let’s share in the comment below (or if you want to write it in a post, you
could link up your post here),

How many
books have you read so far?

Are you on
schedule or left behind?

What is your
most favorite so far?

Which
history are you looking forward to read?

(You don’t
have to answer all the questions; basically tell us what you think about this
challenge so far).

And I would
like to remind you, that in the end of this challenge there will be two
giveaways, one of them for the Analysis posts. If you haven’t submitted your
posts, there is still enough time to do so.

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

I can’t
explain why this long passage from Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth has caught my attention, without spoiling the whole
plot (for those who have not read it). It’s lovely, so vivid, and memorable, and Wharton captured the moment in
a beautiful narration, I almost recognized some Zola-ish style here… I have not
finished the book yet, but I believe I will remember this scene forever,
whatever the end would be.

“Selden had
given her his arm without speaking. She took it in silence, and they moved
away, not toward the supper room, but against the tide which was setting
thither. The faces about her flowed by like the streaming images of sleep: she
hardly noticed where Selden has leading her, till they passed through a glass
doorway at the end of the long suite of rooms and stood suddenly in the fragrant
hush of a garden. Gravel grated beneath their feet, and about them was the
transparent dimness of a mid-summer night. Hanging lights made emerald caverns
in the depth of foliage, and whitened the spray of a fountain falling among
lilies. The magic place was deserted: there was no sound but the splash of the
water on the lily-pads, and a distant drift of music that might have been blown
across a sleeping lake.

Selden and
Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene as a part of their own
dream-like sensations. It would not have surprised them to feel a summer breeze
on their faces, or to see the lights among the boughs reduplicated in the arch
of a starry sky. The strange solitude about them was no stranger than the
sweetness of being alone in it together. At length Lily withdrew her hand, and
moved away a step, so that her white-robed slimness was outlined against the
dusk of the branches. Selden followed her, and still without speaking they
seated themselves on a bench beside the fountain.

Suddenly she
raised her eyes with the beseeching earnestness of a child. "You never
speak to me — you think hard things of me," she murmured. "I think of
you at any rate, God knows!" he said.

"Then
why do we never see each other? Why can't we be friends? You promised once to
help me," she continued in the same tone, as though the words were drawn
from her unwillingly.

"The
only way I can help you is by loving you," Selden said in a low voice.

She made no
reply, but her face turned to him with the soft motion of a flower. His own met
it slowly, and their lips touched.”

*Scene on
Three is Bzee’s meme of posting your captured scenes or passages, and
explaining why they are interesting. The ‘three’ means that we should post them
on the dates with ‘3’ in it: the 3rd, 13th, 23rd,
30th, or 31st.

Thursday, August 7, 2014

All these
times I have been thinking that Dickens’ A
Tale of Two Cities would be my most favorite historical-war-novel ever.
It’s just so memorable; with its famous opening “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times […]” and the
pure love showed by Sidney Carton. In term of war, War and Peace was thicker in ‘war nature’ then A Tale, but Tolstoy emphasized too much
on war idealism that it became partly too serious. But now I think I have found
my new favorite historical-war-novel that exceeded those two: The Debacle.

The Debacle is the only historical novel
by Émile Zola; it depicted the Franco-Prussian war (1870-1871), and became the
penultimate novel of Rougon-Macquart series. The story began in the middle of
the war; the main character is Jean Macquart—a farmer who had been in another
war before—but now the Corporal of the 7th army corps. Another
important character is Maurice Levasseur—a young man brought up well and
educated—now a soldier under Jean’s command. At first they were indifferent of
each other because of their different backgrounds; but in wars, status,
education, wealth, everything that distinguishes someone dissolves and replaced
by humanity. And so, having struggled together, Jean and Maurice became intimate
friends, even closer than blood brother. They were willing to risk their own
lives for the sake of the other.

In terms of
the war, Zola has painstakingly written a very vivid picture of war as
human-killing machine. It was compounded by French army’s bad coordination,
incapability of the generals, and the indecision of the Emperor. France has
been deluded itself by thinking of repeating the past grandeur of Napoleon.
Many people could not realize that the Second Empire was corrupted, and that
the Prussians was now much stronger than they have thought. Ironically, it was
a civilian gentleman named Weiss (Maurice’s brother-in-law) who first predicted
the great defeat of France, but at that time no one listened to him and even thought
him a traitor. Moreover, Weiss—with no military background but his local
knowledge of the land—could see what the Prussians would do; while none of the
military general could read their strategy. It’s more than irony, it’s a
stupidity. And what made the tragedy even tragic, was the stupidity of several
people that finally destroyed many lives—the soldiers as well as civilians.

Zola
explained to us his analysis of the root of the problems in chapter one – part
one:

“The Empire grown old, still acclaimed in a
plebiscite but basically rotten because it had weakened the idea of patriotism
by destroying liberty, and then turning back to liberalism too late and thereby
hastening its own undoing because it was ready to collapse as soon as it
stopped satisfying the lust for pleasure it had let loose; the army certainly
admirable as a brave lot of men, and still wearing the laurels of the Crimea
and Italy, but adulterated by the system of paid substitutes, still in the old
routine of the Africa school, too cocksure of victory to face the great effort
of modern technique; and then the generals, most of them nonentities and eaten
up with rivalries and some of them quite-stupefyingly ignorant, and at their
head the Emperor, a sick man and vacillating, deceived and self-deceiving, and all
facing this terrible adventure into which they were blindly hurling themselves,
with no serious preparation, like a stampede of scared sheep being led to the
slaughter.”

It was painful
to read how the soldiers being maneuvered now here, then there, back and forth,
and in poor conditions: fatigue, hungry, and distressed. And this was how I
loved Zola’s The Debacle. Because it
is not just a historical novel, it’s a living portrayal of a corrupted nation.
Not only honest, but it was also painful; the ending especially. Actually it
reminded me of Germinal, in the sense
of a faint hope in future beneath the ruinous present. Like Etiènne Lantier,
Jean Macquart was a simple man, and because of that, he never had the
upper/middle class sentiment about French past grandeur. He was perhaps the
least afflicted by the idea of beaten by the barbarians of Germany, and that
was how he did not end like Maurice.

Zola proved
himself as a great writer. The Debacle won’t be as it is if he had not done
very thorough researches on the war and on how people reacted over it. And he
(as usual) crafted the history and his naturalism theory on Rougon-Macquart in
his beautiful, powerful, and intense narration. It instantly became my next
favorite, along with Germinal, L’Assommoir, and La Bète Humaine.